height map generator

WendyLuvsCatz

over on the Bryce forum they found this little gem

http://terrain.party/

I tried out Adelaide in Carrara terrain editor with a Google Earth pro satellite diffuse, Octane render

 

http://youtu.be/1fM2LWsU2Vs  

their examples here http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/60812/terrain-height-map-generator

Headwax

Fanks Wendy :)

 

PhilW

That looks to be a great find!  Thanks.

DUDU

Thanks for sharing, Wendy !

I look on the site and I see a simple cart, how is the process to see a heightmap ?

May be simple but...

DUDU

OK, the USGS pages are grey but it's ok when you download the files.

I'll try it in the terrain editor...

WendyLuvsCatz

yes just makes 3 grey scale jpgs

MelanieL

I saw this in the Bryce forum first, but as I've just started looking at Carrara (bought it when it went on offer months ago but couldn't get into it at all at first, until a few purchases in the recent sale encouraged me to try again) I thought I'd give it a try there.

French Pyrenees (Cirque de Gavarnie - spent time there on holiday years ago) , one of the standard shaders but tweaked a bit, even had a go at some clouds - my first ever publically shown Carrara render:

evilproducer

Very nice work. If you are inclined and feeling adventurous, open the shader and look at the settings. try playing around with slope or elevation settings. Try changing up the colors, or using a color gradient and terrain shader functions to drive the color gradient. It's great fun!

SileneUK

This is so cool. I am rubbish at creating terrains. Now I can go find something that might be close to my scene's needs and 1-2-3... magic. Thank you very much!  Silene

MelanieL

evilproducer said:

Very nice work. If you are inclined and feeling adventurous, open the shader and look at the settings. try playing around with slope or elevation settings. Try changing up the colors, or using a color gradient and terrain shader functions to drive the color gradient. It's great fun!

Thanks - I did a little playing (the altitudes in metres were outside the range of my terrain, so I altered them a bit already as I was getting a high grass to rock ratio).  But I can see hours of endless fun fiddling and rendering and fiddling again - it's a bit addictive, isn't it? (I posted that at 1 AM my time and stayed up till after 3 AM playing some more)

I picked up Dartanbeck's Woodland set and more Howie in the sale, so I've quite a lot of examples to take a look at and play with, as well as the standard shaders, etc.

SileneUK

MelanieL said:

evilproducer said:

Very nice work. If you are inclined and feeling adventurous, open the shader and look at the settings. try playing around with slope or elevation settings. Try changing up the colors, or using a color gradient and terrain shader functions to drive the color gradient. It's great fun!

Thanks - I did a little playing (the altitudes in metres were outside the range of my terrain, so I altered them a bit already as I was getting a high grass to rock ratio).  But I can see hours of endless fun fiddling and rendering and fiddling again - it's a bit addictive, isn't it? (I posted that at 1 AM my time and stayed up till after 3 AM playing some more)

I picked up Dartanbeck's Woodland set and more Howie in the sale, so I've quite a lot of examples to take a look at and play with, as well as the standard shaders, etc.

Melanie, what size did you capture your Pyrenees scene?  I am struggling a bit with the 18km size as I am getting way too much area, but I don't see a way to choose a smaller section of the grid. Maybe I am falling down on making the blank terrain insert in Carrara the wrong size, but am using a large scene. What do you guys do in Bryce?  

Or Kev, what am I doing wrong?

I have better luck with working with the Altai Mountains in Siberia as they are more open and sweeping and can faff that a bit. Helps with practice but I am interested in the Dordogne, myself.

Cheers, Silene

evilproducer

I haven't really tried bringing in height maps based on real geography. Well, that's not entirely true, I did try my area once, but it is relatively flat so it was not worth effort.

Jonstark

This little gem is super cool.  I saved the link so that if I need to I can generate a real world terrain in Carrara, very cool stuff!

SileneUK

 

evilproducer said:

I haven't really tried bringing in height maps based on real geography. Well, that's not entirely true, I did try my area once, but it is relatively flat so it was not worth effort.

I did a bit of coastal area here so I could sort of measure where the land and sea met, and then could find my landmark by process of elimination. But for unfamiliar terrain, even in my hometown, it's hard work to get to ground zero. If anyone spends time with this... please post your tips if you'd like to share. I'd like to be able to use it properly!

PhilW

Yes, I've been trying for the last half hour to produce an image of the area around where I live, but it is difficult to orient yourself against the map.  Wendy - you seemed to have a matching satellite image for your little animation, how did you do that?

WendyLuvsCatz

I opened Google Earth pro and saved the satalite image then opened both in GIMP as layers with opacity and sized and translated the Port river and coastline to match then cropped it to the selection.

the text does have 4 co-ordinates for the selection corners but Idid not know how to select that in Google Earth or it may have been easier.

MelanieL

SileneUK said:

MelanieL said:

evilproducer said:

Very nice work. If you are inclined and feeling adventurous, open the shader and look at the settings. try playing around with slope or elevation settings. Try changing up the colors, or using a color gradient and terrain shader functions to drive the color gradient. It's great fun!

Thanks - I did a little playing (the altitudes in metres were outside the range of my terrain, so I altered them a bit already as I was getting a high grass to rock ratio).  But I can see hours of endless fun fiddling and rendering and fiddling again - it's a bit addictive, isn't it? (I posted that at 1 AM my time and stayed up till after 3 AM playing some more)

I picked up Dartanbeck's Woodland set and more Howie in the sale, so I've quite a lot of examples to take a look at and play with, as well as the standard shaders, etc.

Melanie, what size did you capture your Pyrenees scene?  I am struggling a bit with the 18km size as I am getting way too much area, but I don't see a way to choose a smaller section of the grid. Maybe I am falling down on making the blank terrain insert in Carrara the wrong size, but am using a large scene. What do you guys do in Bryce?

Or Kev, what am I doing wrong?

I have better luck with working with the Altai Mountains in Siberia as they are more open and sweeping and can faff that a bit. Helps with practice but I am interested in the Dordogne, myself.

Cheers, Silene

Sorry for the delay - been watching TV with my husband for a while.

I used the basic 18km size for the terrain download, opened a "New scene" in Carrara, picked the largest empty scene size (30,000 ft+? Sorry I'm not on my desktop PC and don't have Carrara on the laptop) created a terrain at whatever is the default size and imported the terrain heightmap onto it and adjusted the scale to flatten the terrain a bit (it came in too lumpy) and moved the camera to a suitable spot. My bit of the Pyrenees luckily has a low valley in the right place for the camera.

If you want a smaller heightmap than 18km then use the + and - boxes on the right hand edge of the webpage and it will take the blue box size up or down by 1 km at a time within limits of 8km to 60 km. According to Horo in the Bryce forum there's not much difference in resolution from 8km to 18km but if you take a larger area (I think he did up to 60 km) then a lot of detail is lost.

PhilW

Thanks Wendy! That was similar to what I was doing but I thought there may be an easier way. I discovered that I still had the original mountains layer in my terrain, which you need to delete before adding the image layer, I am starting now to get recognisable scenary!  These are a couple of very low res test renders from around where I live, the hill with a distinctive shape is called the Chevin, near Otley in Yorkshire.  The map I used still had some roads on it hence the road like feature around the bottom of the hill.

MelanieL

PhilW said:

Yes, I've been trying for the last half hour to produce an image of the area around where I live, but it is difficult to orient yourself against the map.  Wendy - you seemed to have a matching satellite image for your little animation, how did you do that?

You know there's a search function - the magnifying glass near the top left corner - which opens a box where you can enter a town name. (Unless you live in the middle of the countryside in which case that won't help much!) And then you can drag the map around with a mouse (I may be telling you something you already knew in which case: sorry )

ETA: Oops, spent so long typing and checking the terrain.party website to check what was where, I didn't notice you'd already found your landscape. I didn't realise you were a Yorkshireman - I'm originally from Leeds but have lived in Hampshire for years.

ETA: Oh, silly me - that's why you did Linton village! I didn't associate you immediately with that PhilW

PhilW

Thanks Melanie - I downloaded the map for around where I live, but then had difficulty relating the images I was getting to what I knew - as I said before, this was because I had the map overlayed on a (generated) mountains layer, which was probably accounting for most of the landscapes that I was seeing. Having deleted that layer, I suddenly started to recognise features!  I was getting some stepping in the landscape as I think it only imports as 256 levels, but adding some smoothing and a low level of noise successfully hides that.  I also set the terrain size to 18km in the terrain editor (you can enter 18km and it automatically converts it to feet) so the atmospheres should work at a realistic scale. I also added one of my Carrara CloudDomes.

PhilW

Sorry, me again, but I wanted to share this render of the Isle of White (located on the southern edge of the UK). It uses the default terrain shader, which actually looks pretty good at this distance. The terrain map was saved at 45km square.  I'm impressed at how easy this tool is to work with!

de3an

This is all pretty cool, easy and fun to use. But I have to wonder about its accuracy.

I used it to make a terrain of my area. Since I know the elevation of the tallest peak in the terrain, I adjusted the z axis scale to correct the vertical exaggeration. (Mountains being too tall.) And since it's on the California coast I can easily locate sea level.

I then textured it with the same area from Google maps. Looks OK.

I then inserted a plane to be used as a sea level reference and placed it at a z axis of zero. Sized it to match the x,y dimensions of the terrain, and applied a transparent red shader to make it easily visible.

When I attempted to align the terrain's z axis to make the coastline match a z axis of zero I found that it was inconsistent. Some of the sea level areas appeared to be below sea level while others were above. Some inland areas which are several hundred feet above sea level show as being below sea level.

In this image, the red areas would be below sea level if the terrain were accurate.

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but I don't think so.

mjc1016

de3an said:

This is all pretty cool, easy and fun to use. But I have to wonder about its accuracy.

I used it to make a terrain of my area. Since I know the elevation of the tallest peak in the terrain, I adjusted the z axis scale to correct the vertical exaggeration. (Mountains being too tall.) And since it's on the California coast I can easily locate sea level.

I then textured it with the same area from Google maps. Looks OK.

I then inserted a plane to be used as a sea level reference and placed it at a z axis of zero. Sized it to match the x,y dimensions of the terrain, and applied a transparent red shader to make it easily visible.

When I attempted to align the terrain's z axis to make the coastline match a z axis of zero I found that it was inconsistent. Some of the sea level areas appeared to be below sea level while others were above. Some inland areas which are several hundred feet above sea level show as being below sea level.

In this image, the red areas would be below sea level if the terrain were accurate.

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but I don't think so.

 

Read the included text file...it explains what's going on.

But basically you aren't doing anything wrong, it's a limitation of the the site/software.

 

Elevation Adjustment
--------------------

The original elevation models for this area contained elevations ranging from
495 through 923 meters.

These elevation values need to get transformed into a grayscale images. This
section describes how that translation was done in this particular case.

(The game isn't yet released, so what follows is a guess, but I think it's a
pretty good guess. If this turns out to be wrong, please use the link above to
re-export this data once we figure out what the deal is.)

Cities: Skylines supports terrain from 0m to 1024m. It represents elevations as
16-bit unsigned integers, which can be read directly from 16-bit height maps.
Each level therefore corresponds to 1/64th of a meter: 0 is 0m, 64 is 1m, etc.
Cities: Skylines maps default to having sea level at 40m, with typical terrain
starting at 60m.

These heightmaps were adjusted such that 495m (actual) is equal to 40m in
game. All other elevations are relative to that.

Again, the lowest point in these height maps is now 40m in game; all other
terrain is even higher. You will likely want to adjust the water level as a
result.

In summary...the 'base' elevation is not accurate and is just an arbitrary number for use in some game.

de3an

I discovered that I also accidently imported the terrain height map on top of a default terrain in the Carrara terrain editor (I didn't read PhilW's post carefully enough. )

After correcting that, all of the wonkyness went away.

SileneUK

De3an, like MJC said... it's not perfect. For a free tool it's amazing! I did expect the inaccuracies. I do wonder if I'd buy such a tool if it encompassed Europe and Asia. Or if one exists, how expensive it is.

Thanks, Mel, that makes more sense now. I originally thought that reducing the 18 down to eg 8 was just spreading out the area that would be captured. Now I see that the blue border shrinks and actually grabs a more concentrated area. And as you say, 8 or 18 does not make too much difference.

Thanks, Phil, for your efforts. So if you put 18km in the terrain size, it converts. What about the Scale To box above the terrain view window in the model room, do you change that as well? IOW came out really well, just need to tweak the Needles or raise the sea level? I never thought about beach tide-lines, etc when I did my coastal test.

Thanks, Wendy, for your explanation. I will try Google overlaying as well. I think I have Pro, but uninstalled it, so will get that back again as it sounds so useful now.  Beats any terrain levels or textures I could create... but then I can paint on the Google texture once in place.Thank you again for posting this great tool. It's so addictive!

Am working most of today, but will get to this in the week. Maybe there will be more posts and examples. If I have any success, will put them up. These are fantastic. Cheers all for posting!

  Silene

PhilW

Hi Silene,  if you want your terrain to be a realistic size in Carrara, you can set the World Size to match the data you downloaded (18km by default), OR you can rescale it, but you don't need to do both.  Your render map size should probably be 1024 x 1024 to match the size of the imported maps.  You can then set the height to a realistic (or not so realistic) level. 

On the IoW terrain, I do not think that the resolution was enough to capture the Needles rocks, the feature you see at the western end is the headland. If I am reading it correctly, the sampling for non-US data is every 30m (approx 100ft) so finer details will not be seen.  It would be great if this could be enhanced to say a 10m sampling. Automatically matching satellite maps would be great too!  The sampling also means that a 1000x1000 map with sampling every 30m will give a 30km x 30km area, so reducing down any further than the default isn't really giving any better resolution (except in the US, where it looks to have 10m sampling grid, hence 10km square would be around the minimum).

Dondec

Thank you JaguarElla and all you technique contributors.  What a cool find!

   - Don

SileneUK

PhilW said:

Hi Silene,  if you want your terrain to be a realistic size in Carrara, you can set the World Size to match the data you downloaded (18km by default), OR you can rescale it, but you don't need to do both.  Your render map size should probably be 1024 x 1024 to match the size of the imported maps.  You can then set the height to a realistic (or not so realistic) level. 

On the IoW terrain, I do not think that the resolution was enough to capture the Needles rocks, the feature you see at the western end is the headland. If I am reading it correctly, the sampling for non-US data is every 30m (approx 100ft) so finer details will not be seen.  It would be great if this could be enhanced to say a 10m sampling. Automatically matching satellite maps would be great too!  The sampling also means that a 1000x1000 map with sampling every 30m will give a 30km x 30km area, so reducing down any further than the default isn't really giving any better resolution (except in the US, where it looks to have 10m sampling grid, hence 10km square would be around the minimum).

Thanks, Phil. I finally figured that out, but thanks for posting about not needing to scale up.  I can see that for Europe the altitude is not the best. I will look around the US for a similar area. I have been to several national parks, so will look at some Google images to see what I can use for a substitute that might look right.  GIves me an excuse to play with this more. It's great!

 Silene

 

Dondec

I haven't had time to try this yet, but I was wondering if it might be possible to overlay parts of a lower res map with a much higher res one, say where you need more sharp, well defined cliff data that's closer to the camera. 

   - Don

PhilW

Don - something like that should be possible, but keep in mind that the maximum resultion is around one sample every 30m (10m for US) so even for US data, you are not going to get very fine detail. I have found the data works well for longer shots and background terrains.  Maybe match that with higher res modelled tarrain for the foreground.

TangoAlpha

There's definitely higher resolution data out there, although not for free. (but if you're working on a commercial project, that may not be an issue). Flight sim had a 10m DEM addon for the UK back in 2007, and the Ordinance Survey currently sells 5m data, although it isn't cheap.